astrophysics

Tag archives for astrophysics

By Dr. Gerry Harp, Senior Astrophysicist, Center for SETI Research, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs Trained as a quantum mechanic, Dr. Gerry Harp was deeply interested in possibilities for using the multiple telescopes of the Allen Telescope Array to generate steerable “beams” on the sky — beams that could be far smaller than any single…

By Dr. Ignacio Mosqueira, an astrophysicist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs Ignacio Mosqueira works with Paul Estrada to piece together the way in which giant planets – such as Jupiter and Saturn — and their moons and rings formed. Ignacio notes that…

By Dr. Paul EstradaPlanetary physicist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs If planets are a dime a dozen, moons are less than a penny each. There are at least 139 moons just within our own solar system. Most of these are the property…

Don Backer, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley who discovered the first millisecond pulsar, died on July 25. He was director of Berkeley’s Radio Astronomy Laboratory and the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in Hat Creek, California – a collection of 42 dishes that recently began scanning the sky and searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.…